Road Trip, vol. 14

A note to the reader: It might interest you to know that Uncle Alvin, at the time of this trip, was a seminary student, and pastor of a small Minnesota congregation. I am reserching the other 3 boys, but I suspect they were also college kids.

Sunday January 22, 1933 The next morning being Sunday we slept a little longer than usual but got up in time to go to church at Trinity M. E. Church, which was the one the Lehnerts and Borchardts attended. The district superintendent was there that Sunday and preached though I was rather disappointed over the sermon itself. The singing was quite good but the most striking thing about it all was the very friendly spirit of all the people in the church. Everybody it seemed came up to us and shook hands and wished us well.

That afternoon we went over to Borchardts and then went driving around with the same party as the night before except that Agnes and Pearl were not along. All seven of us rode in Milton’s car so we were very crowded. We first drove out to Roosevelt Memorial Park where we heard part of the organ concert, including Mother McCree and the The Glowworm. The organ is enclosed in quite a large structure about 50 or 60 feet long and probably 40 or 50 feet wide. One side of it is open except for iron bars, this of course being the front of it. The organ itself could not be seen but when one stood right up to the front of the building the music was so loud a person could hardly stand it. The organist was in a glassed-in dugout perhaps a hundred feet away from the building. The keyboard of the organ was the most intricate of any I have ever seen. It was a Wurlitzer organ and one of the largest in the United States.

We then drove on through rather hilly country out to Long Beach and then to the breakwater. We walked out on this for a ways as far as the boardwalk went, where the rest of the party stopped except we four boys. We went out perhaps half a mile further to enjoy the ocean air. Some of the navy ships were anchored quite close to the breakwater so we could gain a very good view of them. Most of them were hospital ships or others besides battleships and cruisers, though when we got out farther we came close to a battleship. They certainly were large ships and as we all know, very expensive. There were a few freighters and at least one passenger ship moving about in the harbor that day, too.
We could see Catalina Island from the breakwater, though it was very distant.

Towards evening we drove along Long Beach and saw a few passenger ships at berth. One of them had been partially destroyed by fire a while before. After darkness had fallen we drove out on a circle of land which shut off a bathing beach. From there we could see two gambling ships beyond the three mile limit. They were all lighted up with electric lights so they would be conspicuous, and their purpose was certainly achieved. We then walked through their amusement center there, sort of a Coney Island, and just looked the thing over for a while. There was nothing else to do so we went back home.